Soko

Stéphanie Alexandra Mina Sokolinski (born 26 October 1985), known professionally as Soko (stylized as SoKo), is a French singer, songwriter, actress, and dancer. Soko released her debut single "I'll Kill Her" in 2007. It achieved airplay success in several European countries as well as Australia, peaking at number three on the Danish music charts, and was included on her debut EP Not Sokute (2007). Her debut studio album I Thought I Was an Alien was released in 2012 and contains the single "We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow", which achieved ninth place on the Billboard Hot 100. Ensuing years saw the releases of her second and third studio albums My Dreams Dictate My Reality (2015) and Feel Feelings (2020). As an actress, Soko began appearing in a number of French productions in the early 2000s and earned a César Award for Most Promising Actress nomination for her role in the film In the Beginning (2009). She won the Courage in Acting Award at the Women Film Critics Circle Awards and the Best Actress award at the Mar del Plata Film Festival for her role as Augustine in the film Augustine (2012). She later appeared in the short film First Kiss (2014), which featured "We Might Be Dead by Tomorrow" and contributed to the song's chart success. Her role as Loie Fuller in The Dancer (2016) earned her Best Actress nominations at the César and Lumières Awards. Early life Stéphanie Alexandra Mina Sokolinski was born on 26 October 1985 in Bordeaux, France to a Russian-Polish father and a French-Italian mother. She has Jewish ancestry and said that "half of my family died in concentration camps" during the Holocaust. She was raised Catholic "because they all denied their religion and what not", but she has stated that she feels "Jewish trauma". She has five siblings. Her father died of an aneurysm when she was five years old. The incident had a profound impact on her, influencing her to become a vegetarian and later a vegan. This was followed by the deaths of all her grandparents and her godfather within the span of four years. She says that, as a result, she became "obsessed with death" and developed abandonment issues that were exacerbated by the fact that her single mother "wasn't emotionally available". She has used the nickname Soko for as long as she can remember. She began taking piano lessions at the age of five but described herself as a "very bad student" and stopped when she was 11.